Traditional communication systems, such as standard and cellular telephone systems, enable verbal communications between people at different locations. Communication systems for audibly-impaired individuals (e.g., individuals with hearing impairments, speech impairments, or a combination thereof) may also enable non-audible communications instead of, or in addition to, verbal communications. Some communication systems for audibly-impaired individuals enable communications between communication devices for audibly-incapable individuals (e.g., video phones, web cameras, etc.) and communication systems for audibly-capable individuals (e.g., standard telephones, cellular phones, etc.). For example, a video relay service (VRS) may provide speech to sign language translation services, and sign language to speech translation services for a communication session between a video communication device for an audibly-impaired individual and a traditional communication device for an audibly-capable user. In other words, the VRS may be used to facilitate a conversation between an audibly-impaired user and an audibly-capable person.
The audibly-impaired individual may communicate with a communication assistant (e.g., communicate via sign language), and then the communication assistant conveys the message audibly to a far-end user (e.g., an audibly-capable user). For communication in the other direction, the communication assistant listens to the audibly-capable user and then signs what was spoken to the audibly-impaired user. The communication assistant may, therefore, act as a translator for both the audibly-impaired user (e.g., using sign language) and the far-end user (e.g., communicating via speech communication). Thus, the communication assistant directly communicates with each of the audibly-impaired individual and the audibly-capable individual to facilitate communication between the audibly-impaired individual and the audibly-capable individual. By way of example, Sorenson Communications® offers the Ntouch® VP videophone and the VP-200 videophone that utilize the Sorenson Video Relay Service,® a service that provides sign language interpretation to audibly impaired video phone users.